Ariel Sharon

Five weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden publicly commanded his foot-soldiers to ramp up the violence against American civilians. But five weeks before his death, he privately instructed his lieutenants to refrain from killing any civilians. Did the world's most notorious terrorist have a moral awakening and grow soft? Hardly. His unheralded tactical shift was purely strategic.

This month, the Combating Terrorism Center at the West Point Military Academy released 17 declassified documents that were seized from bin Laden's Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound in the targeted killing last year. These documents, coupled with his post-Sept. 11 admissions to the media, portray...

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Five weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Osama bin Laden publicly commanded his foot-soldiers to ramp up the violence against American civilians. But five weeks before his death, he privately instructed his lieutenants to refrain from killing any civilians....

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JERUSALEM — Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the iron-willed army general who fought in nearly all of his nation's major wars and spearheaded Jewish settlement of Palestinian territories, then years later presided over Israel's withdrawal...

JERUSALEM — Yitzhak Shamir, the onetime underground Jewish fighter and long-serving Israeli prime minister whose unyielding belief in the right of Jews to all of the biblical Land of Israel often exasperated U.S. policymakers, has died. He was 96.
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